Paella Mixta Recipe

Daniel joined the Serious Eats culinary team in 2014 and writes recipes, equipment reviews, articles on cooking techniques. Prior to that he was a food editor at Food & Wine magazine, and the staff writer for Time Out New York's restaurant and bars section.

Just a little longer, I want to get a really good socarrat for the photos. I said those words a little too confidently, and repeated them a few too many times, as my test batches of paella finished cooking over smoldering coals on an outdoor grill. I was aiming for that famed copper-colored crust of rice on the bottom of the broad paella pan, and I was sure I could nail it. Except I didn't. I burned it. And then I burned it again.

There are many things to know about paella, but one of the most important is this: Don't burn your paella in search of the ultimate socarrat. The socarrat is something you learn to do over time, as you master your own setup—the charcoal or wood you're using, the grill you're working on, the specific paella recipe you're making. It's not something you can casually pull off just because you think you know your way around a live fire. (That's a side-eye at myself, in case it's not clear.)

Recipe: Paella Mixta, As Served At Barcelona Tapas In Clayton

A few weeks later I was standing by the paella makers atMercado Little Spain, the New York City food court that is chef José Andrés's paean to Spanish gastronomy. They're not just making paella at Mercado Little Spain, they're doing it as close to a traditional al fresco Valencian paella feast as could ever be possible in New York. Despite being in an indoor concourse on the lower level of the new Hudson Yards development, Andrés's team is cooking huge pans of paella over roaring wood fires, all of it set up in a large rectangular fireproof box that looks vaguely like a shuffleboard court, if shuffleboard involved pushing around flaming strips of kindling instead of a bunch of plastic disks.

The setup is important because it allows them to do things I couldn't do as easily on the kettle grill—namely, constantly manage the fire throughout the cooking process. In their traditional setup, the pans are positioned on large iron stands, and the fire is built beneath them. The cooks use thin strips of firewood, which light quickly and burn fast.

In a matter of minutes, they can make a fire so energetic the flames shoot up above the pans, then reduce it to smoldering embers just moments later. Using a spade, they can push those embers out from under the pan to prevent the rice from burning as the paella finishes cooking, then sweep them back under for the last 30 seconds of cooking for one final boost of heat and, hopefully, a good socarrat.

Try Our Easy Weeknight Paella Recipe

Using a kettle grill makes managing the fire harder, since you can't tinker with it once the paella pan is set down on the grill grate. Any adjustments to the fire would require lifting the paella pan and removing the grate, then putting it all back before continuing. It's not something you want to do with a wide, shallow pan full of boiling liquid and rice. This means you're more likely to choose charcoal as your fuel, which burns longer and requires less intervention, but also doesn't die down as quickly the way you'd ideally want.

The more sustained heat of charcoal, in turn, needs to be managed in other ways. If your charcoal is still too hot as the rice absorbs the last of the liquid, you have to reduce the heat before anything scorches. Since you can't push the coals out from under the pan, you need to lift the pan higher, moving it farther from the heat source. Wadded-up tinfoil works for a short lift, while bricks work to gain even more height.

It takes some practice to figure out how to get the heat management right, and even a pro like me can mess it up by trying to push the paella too aggressively towards a crunchy brown crust on the bottom. Even the experienced cooks at Mercado Little Spain, who've been cooking paellas up the wazoo every day since the market opened several months ago, say they don't nail it every single time—and they've got their method so dialed in they can set a 17-minute timer when the liquid starts boiling and take a perfectly done paella off the coals the instant the buzzer sounds.

Paella Authentic Recipe

But maybe we need to back up. Why are we cooking paella over a grill or live fire in the first place, aside from the fact that it's traditional?

Because of how wide a large paella pan is, there's really no way to make paella for a crowd other than over a live fire or on a grill. A stovetop burner is too small for a large paella pan, and would create hot and cold spots that would lead to uneven cooking, with soupy rice in some areas and overcooked sections in others. You can use the stovetop for smaller paella pans—around a foot or so in diameter—but not the large ones meant for a feast. And that's really when paella is most fun anyway.

A live fire or bed of charcoals gives us the broad, even expanse of heat that will ensure every inch of the paella pan is being heated sufficiently. If you have a grill or other setup that allows side-access to the fire the way the traditional iron stands do, you can more easily emulate that classic paella cooking method, with a wood fire that you manage continuously. If you have a kettle grill, which is how I tested my recipes, you have to do what I suggested above—use charcoal and play with the pan's distance from the coals to control temperature.

Modesto's Paella Mixta

As hard as it is to get a good socarrat, it's important to remember that that's not the defining feature of a good paella, though it is very desirable. Chef Nico Lopez of Mercado Little Spain said it to me plainly, I prefer a paella perfectly cooked without a socarrat than a burned one. So, take heart: You can make a great paella at home on a grill with or without the socarrat. If you get the socarrat, that's just gravy.

Paella is known around the world as one of Spain's most iconic dishes, but the most traditional version, paella Valenciana, is a rarity outside of the region where it's from. Made from meats like chicken and rabbit, sometimes snails, and a narrow set of vegetables—broad green beans similar to Romano beans, plump fresh white beans called garrofó, tomatoes, sometimes artichoke hearts—plus seasonings like saffron, and, of course, the rice itself. The liquid used to cook the rice is just water, not stock.

They make a true paella Valenciana at Mercado Little Spain, and Chef Lopez explained to me that the secret to its flavor is to deeply brown all the ingredients before adding the water and rice. This browning, described as la marca in Spain, is so important to the dish because it effectively helps create a flavorful broth right in the pan.

How To Make Paella

There are plenty of other paella variants today: vegetable paellas, seafood paellas, meaty paellas, and, of course, the mixed seafood-and-meat paella that is perhaps the most famous in the rest of the world but makes folks in Valencia gag.

The technique for making paella is pretty similar from one version to another. I developed this seafood-and-meat paellamixtafor a17-inch paella panthat will fit on a standard Weber kettle grill and feed about eight people. Proud Spaniards will denounce this recipe as blasphemous, but we all know lots of people love it.Even worse, I've included chorizo in my paella mixta, another major paella no-no (although at least one Spanish food writerhas arguedthat chorizo was once an acceptable paella ingredient).

For those of you who wish to stick closer to tradition, I also developed a meat-only paella, chock full of chicken and pork.

Easy Mixed Paella

What's most important here aren't the specific recipes and ingredients, but the technique. Once you understand it, you can toss tomatoes at my head and kick my chorizo-studded, meat-and-seafood-mingling paella out the door and make whatever kind you want.

This is a rough sketch of how various paella recipes work. There are, of course, exceptions to this generalized process; one might choose to do certain steps differently depending on the paella they're making and the exact results they want. Mostly, though, this is how it works.

If your paella pan is new, you'll need to prep it first following the manufacturer's instructions (they often come with a protective coating that needs to be boiled off), and then the pan should be lightly oiled all over to keep the steel from rusting.

Paella Mixta Recipe

Build your fire, getting the coals very hot, spread them out, and set the paella pan on top. (If you're using a more traditional setup, you can build the fire directly under the pan.) Add oil, push it around the pan with a long metal spatula, then add your pieces of